Girl of the Silver Sphere
J. Harvey Haggard
Beautiful, impossibly savage, Prince Ilon loved
her madly. For her he would almost dare the blackest
secret of the cosmos. Almost—but not quite....
A silver sphere swam in vague depths. The surrounding frame of intricate mechanism gave off a soft phosphorescence that strengthened and faded by turns. A young man, robed in gossamervitri of richest hue, leaned over, watching keenly.
His fingers moved controls at the bottom of the machine. The silver sphere leaped upward in the vision plate, swelling like a balloon. Continents and seas were now visible. Then one area swelled over the visor-plate. Gradually a small spot became a city, a strange sprawling city. He found a certain street, a certain house, a certain room.
She was walking around on the floor of the room, dressed in the scant costume of the period of that silver sphere. She never left the floor. Her body was singularly graceful, her face angelic. Strangely, it seemed, she had no control over gravity, and was forced towalk or beconveyed across the surface of her planet.
"Oh beautiful, primitive girl!" he whispered chokingly, gripping his fingers tight on the control board before him."Savage girl of lost ages!"
The girl smiled. She seemed to turn directly toward him, and her blue eyes were filled with a dreamy, half-yearning promise, as if she had heard his words and had answered.
Yet she had never seen him. She didn't even know he existed. She couldn't even imagine the wonders of flashing through interstellar worlds by use of thought-force, nor picture a means of existing entirely on basic radiation, sucked from the atoms themselves. This young man, slender and well-proportioned, was a product of endless evolution and progression. She was a retrograde current of atavism that had persisted somehow on one outlaw world.
Savage, yes! But there was no mistaking the light in Ilon Karth's eyes as he followed every movement of her little graceful body.
Suddenly an awareness of someone approaching burst into his mentality. He wheeled, an expression of annoyance on his face. With an abrupt movement of his hand he struck a switch that caused the glowing of the machine to die. The sphere, and the lovely girl of that alien globe, vanished utterly.
Now the surrounding walls, glowing with light of their own, flickered. An ovoid opening in solidity appeared, forced by the mental-push of the approaching person. The figure of an old man, venerable of appearance, stooped and robed in the gold-mesh-cloth of the Galax-Mentor, float
